My Facebook Application Week 1: When nobody comes

It's been a week since we launched the BookLobby application in Facebook. We've already got two completed booklobbies; one by me and one by my developer.

This situation was expected. I'm really just getting up to speed on social marketing. Most of the time I've budgeted toward BookLobby has been spent wrangling friends and acquaintances into doing something as a favor. We'll see where that goes.

I have excuses too for why nobody has come. Here's my current list:

1. It takes commitment to do a Booklobby. Be patient.
2. We aren't in the Application search list yet. I'm not yet sure why this is.
3. We haven't given visitors a way to share the application. We didn't want to trick people into sharing like so many spam applications, but we should have provided SOME way to share.
4. We don't explain enough about what you should do on the pages we present
5. Our marketing guy is weak (gulp)

I find myself trapped in a little Catch 22: I don't want to invite some A players until we have content, but it looks like we won't have content until I invite some A players.

Right now, I'm favoring patience and wrangling up some content from my personal network.

What would you do?

• Buy some installs from Slide or Rock You?
• Start courting political bloggers?
• Send out press releases?

I Launched a Facebook Application

I can already hear you yawning. But, as an online marketing guy, I need to know more about the moving parts of this social strategy.

Plus, I had an idea that needed to be implemented. I'm actually very proud of it.

I want to start by talk about what I'm learning, not what the application does. Bear with me (or scroll down) to learn what the application is about.

My Un-Facebook Application

Those who have implemented successful Facebook applications will tell me that I've already committed a couple of enormous errors that will doom the application to failure.

First, I'm not interested in understanding an advertising business model, so we aren't looking for advertisers nor are we displaying any advertising. We expect the application to be self-funded based on affiliate fees.

Second, I want the content to be the reason people tell others, not that they forgot to click "Skip" when asked to invite all of their friends. So, we aren't going to ask you to share with your friends. We want you to share it with all of your friends, so we better have some damn good content.

Yes, we may be doomed.

But comments by Zuckerberg at the SXSW conference and sources like Allfacebook are hinting that this strategy may actually work in our favor. We keep the SPAM down.

Other than that, we're a mashup application that relies on the contributions of users to create the content and spread the word.

Selling My Facebook Application

I have to admit that, despite all of my supposed marketing genius, I find it difficult to know how to coordinate my marketing approach. There are many ways to spread the word.

What would you do?

The Application

OK, so here's the skinny on the application.

It's called BookLobby. Please install it now and give it a whirl.

BookLobby makes it easy for you to send a book of your choosing to an elected official or politician of your choosing complete with your commentary. Will the politician read it? Well, his staff might. They're more likely to read it than any form email you send.

What's more important is what Facebook brings to the picture. Your commentary becomes part of the public conversation fueled by the social machinery of a major social network. It's power politics from the ground up, and I'm very excited.

You can read more about the booklobbies over at the BookLobby Blog. I'll try to limit my commentary on Customer Chaos to what I'm learning about marketing a Facebook application.

Why Web Designers and Conversion Scientists Butt Heads

This is a hilarious riff on the bad decisions business managers make when they do their own Web design (or let their Web developer do it). It starts off funny enough.

The first product advertised is "Make My Logo Bigger Cream." Spray it on any Web site or ad and your Logo becomes the major visible feature -- instantly!

On the Web, business managers apply this same concept to copy. The result is Web sites that talk about the company and its solutions with no recognition for the PROBLEMS that their visitors are trying to solve.

This satires a battle that both designers and Conversion Scientists fight often. But, then the video goes to far.

In space, no one can hear you persuade.

The next product "advertised" is  "Whitespace Eliminator". Here's where action-oriented Conversion Scientists diverge from emotion-oriented designers. To the Conversion Scientist, whitespace is only helpful if it helps to guide the eye along a page to relevant information. To the designer it might be used to communicate openness, freedom, simplicity or any other host of emotions. On the Web, it's the expansive page headers that push the messages down "below the fold" that will jack your bounce rate through the roof. Often, people just want to see what you have to say and have no interest in openness, freedom, or simplicity.

Give them what they want.

The video even gives us a great example of what Agency Fusion (the video's copyright holder) might recommend, complete with what the Eisenbergs call "Wee-Wee" copy:

Take a Load Off.
"Dotbiznet develops and licenses Internet based products which help make personal computers easier to use and maintain by large and small business users and individual consumers."

Using so much space to say so little is anathema to our work as Conversion Scientists. All that space basically says "Dotbiznet does something with PCs and we do it in a field." Huh? I'm sure the folks at Agency Fusion are actually poking fun at themselves with this... aren't they?

So, I think the Whitespace Eliminator is actually a helpful product here.

Emphasize the relevant information.

The video then moves on to the next product featured in this video series: "Starburst Dust"

Don't look up. Tell me the cost of these offers from the ad at the top of this post. You probably new because of the Starburst with $29.99 in it, right? (Please comment below to confirm). Drawing your readers' eyes to relevant information, like price is what good conversion design does. Now, I've never recommended a Starburst, but I do recommend colored boxes that stand out AND placement near the top of the page.

So, here again, I think I have to disagree with the designers' sarcasm.

Use color to serve your visitors, not your ego.

Next up is the Fluoresce Sizer spray. Just spray it on and your Web site becomes a rainbow of fluorescent colors. This is extreme, but designers can get a little inflexible with their color palette. Conversion Scientists want certain things to stand out. Good designers are our best resource for using color to our advantage.

But, bad designers also do things like make link text almost the same color as the rest of the text (until you mouse over it). Not helpful to the reader or the business manager. Blue underlined links may not match the palette, but everyone knows what they mean. So change the palette.

Finally -- and all for just $29.99 -- there's Emotionator. By rubbing Emotionator creme on your marketing or inserting the "patented" Emotionator USB device into your computer, you can add heart-rending images to your marketing, such as American flags, puppies and baby seals. There are plenty of designers who will laugh at this bit of satire, and then turn around and put stock images of starched business people on a business Web site.

Images are powerful. Choose them well based on your conversion profiles. Remember this: a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. Words create more powerful images than pixels.

Treat your designers well.

So, I've spent far to much time taking a satirical video seriously. I've been tough on designers before, so I better fess up: I'm not in any way equipped, trained or talented enough to do what decent designers do. I've tried. Just look at my blog. If a designer does their homework, they should nail it. If they don't do their homework, they should copy their Conversion Scientist's homework.

The REAL gem of the video is THE LOOK. As a Conversion Scientist, you will see this look from your designers. You can even "see" this look over the phone. I don't need to explain it, but be prepared.

 

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

#12. Do You Charge for Your Free Service?

Am I a marketing sheep? 261 Questions

Xobni is free. They're offering a private beta that is free, if you can get in.

Those of us who want to get an early taste of the service are paying for admittance. We're paying with our connections, with our links, and with our opinion.

I hope Xobni the application is as smart.

At this point, I'm not a Xobni fan. I've never used it. But I did request to get into their private beta. That was almost two months ago. I've done this with dozens of services.

When I got an email from them recently, I'd already forgotten what they do. But, they said I could get in early and with a click they would tell me how.

The Life's Blood of Web 2.0

What does any Web 2.0 company need to survive and thrive?

Not money. At least not much.

Not a high-powered sales team.

They need more people to try the site, people who will help them make it better. So, Xobni offered three ways to get into their early beta.

You should copy these down.

1. Invite friends (at least 4)
2. Qualify yourself as a desirable beta tester
3. Put their badge on your blog and generate two signups.

So, they've turned what could be a dark period with no press into a social free-for-all. This is more powerful than any $9.95 monthly subscription fee -- at least at this point in their life.

Smart.

What are you charging for your free services?

P.S.: Here's the badge. Now go join so I can get in early.

MarketingSherpa Weighs in on Using Personas to Lift Revenue

If you don't get to this content before March 26, signup for a MarketingSherpa trial to get this case study on Personas.

In this case study from H20+, Sherpa give us seven steps for creating and using Personas. I wanted to weigh in.

1. Start with what you know

The beauty of personas is that, by developing them, you are really just organizing what you already know about your customers and Web visitors.

2. Talk to people who interact with your customers

The case study calls out customer service reps, sales people and technical support reps as sources for knowledge that can be shaped into personas. Smaller companies will want to include founders, product managers and marketing managers.

3. Dig into your data

This is pretty intuitive, but don't let a lack of data keep you from developing a set of personas. It is better to market to a specific "wrong" visitor than it is to market to nobody.

4. Identify the holes

Often times, we don't know some of the key reasons that people take action. What information are you not considering?

5. Fill in the blanks

Surveys, focus groups and such are really only effective when you're trying to answer specific questions. You already know what you know. Use these tools to find out what you don't know.

6. Name your personas

I'd go a step further and say give them names that will invoke their personality and role. Some of the persona names I've developed include Naive Nick, Penny Planner, Larry Leftbrain, and Victor Visionary. I also attach a picture of them to each profile.

7. Refine Personas

When developing personas for Web marketing, I recommend updating personas with each analytics review -- typically once per month. The changes may not be significant, but if you realize you're missing a segment of your visitors, you can add new personas immediately. This is better than waiting a year.

I'll also add the following suggestion provided by Lynn Pausic from Expero, Inc. in her presentation to the Bootstrap Network in January:

8. Put your personas up on a Wiki

All too often the personas are shoved into a drawer or buried on someone's hard drive. Put them on a wiki where they can be easily accessed and updated by the entire staff.

Needless to say, you should be subscribe to MarketingSherpa's free best-of newsletter.

MarketingSherpa: How to Use Personas to Lift Revenue 500% in 7 Easy-to-Follow Steps

Presentations on Conversion in Austin

If you're in the Austin area in March, you have two opportunities to catch my presentation Conversion: The most important word for online businesses.

Tonight, March 18, I'll be presenting at a meeting of the Bootstrap Network at 6:30pm. The meeting will be held at Cafe Caffeine (click for map).

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I'll be presenting at the Successful Networking Association on Wednesday, March 26 over lunch. This meeting will be held at Peony Asian Cuisine starting at 11:30.

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I hope you can make it.

Watch my blog for slides.

#11 Do You Understand Signaling Theory

261 Questions

"Yes. Absolutely," he said with some aplomb, yet his head shook back and forth tightly as he spoke the words. Immediately, I felt a twinge of concern that I hadn't been heard or understood. I wanted him to get my point. I felt strongly about it. His mouth spoke the words I wanted to hear. His head signaled something different.

Either he wasn't listening or he was thinking something more than his words communicated. Maybe he was tired of listening to me. In the parlance of Tom Wanek, this was counter-signaling. I recently saw Tom's presentation at the Wizard Academy on Signaling Theory. He gave me permission to summarize it here.

Signaling: Aligning actions with words to gain credibility and trust in your marketing.

UPDATE: Tom Wanek is teaching the workshop Fight the Big Boys and Win at the Wizard Academy near Austin, Texas May 13-14. Free meals and lodging for first 12 students.

The Costs of Signaling

There is a cost to making action and communication match. In the case of my friend, he could have paid with better attention, or with honesty about his doubts. Tom would have called the first a "Time and Energy" cost; the latter an "Opportunity Cost" in that he may have insulted me and lost all opportunity with me.

The key to credibility is the cost of aligning word and action. If you pay the cost, you can gain the credibility.

Tom identified six Signaling Costs in his presentation.

Material Wealth (or your businesses' resources)

To build credibility, don't make claims that the business hasn't made real.

If you're going to offer a warranty as proof of your quality, you're going to have to give some money back. That's a material cost

If you're going to taut your great customer service, you're going to have to hire excellent people to service your customers. That's a real investment of salary dollars.

If you're going to claim industry-leading technology (please never use this terminology) you've got to invest in technology that offers more than your competitors. That's a real capital expenditure.

Time and Energy

Where does the business you're marketing for focus its energy? At Conversion Sciences, I would get more leads if I led with my SEO or SEM resources. It's what people are looking for today. But I spend 75% of my time on Conversion Analysis. Hence, I focus my brand and messaging on conversion. For example, my title is "Conversion Specialist." Better than "Online Marketing Specialist," this signals where I invest my time.

By this time next year, everyone will know what "conversion" means.

Opportunity

What opportunities are you willing to pass by so that you can signal clearly?

This is the cost that marketing to personas illuminates. In the process of focusing your marketing message on a few visitor personas, you must stop messaging to some segment of your visitorship. That's the opportunity cost.

Tom uses the example of  Toyota's Scion brand, which is targeted and signals to buyers 18 to 24 with non-conformist tendencies. It was a success and they could have significantly expanded the market to older, more conformist buyers. But they felt they would have lost their core buyers. So the capped production and maintained their targeted message.

That's a real opportunity cost.

Power and Control

The social marketing movement has caused us to begin considering this cost. Anytime you let visitors and customer post on your site, you lose power and control. Facebook recently counter-signaled it's community by trying to take back some control with their Beacon advertising platform. This unilateral action was not in alignment with their signaling that said the users owned and controlled their Facebook experience.

Reputation and Prestige

Standing for what you believe can cost you in reputation and prestige. Tom uses the example of Patagonia, a clothing manufacturer that, in the midst of thriving turned "green." They now only offer environmentally-friendly products. Naturally, a portion of their loyal customer base found this to be "preachy" or alarmist. It was inevitable that their reputation would suffer, but the owner decided to signal his beliefs and, by proxy Patagonia's values.

Safety and Well-being

The most extreme example of paying the price of safety and well-being is "betting the company" on an idea or marketing message. Putting your entire marketing budget into Superbowl ad is one example.

Lifelock CEO Todd Davis published his Social Security Number in the company's marketing and advertising. This was bold, and seems to have worked well for them. Of course, if he'd been hacked, the company would have been humiliated and all credibility lost.

The Benefits Must Exceed the Cost

My friend Jeffrey Peltier is an incredibly knowledgeable search marketer. Yet, he doesn't have a Web site. Not even a blog. He has great referral business and the cost of maintaining a site that would pass muster for a search "expert" is too high. While his competition is spending time on their Web site, he's spending time making customers LOVE -- and talk about -- his results.

More From Tom

It is always a treat to spend time at the Wizard Academy, and this past Tuesday's Open House was no exception. The Academy is about understanding communication. The ideas you'll find are generally new ways of looking at how we deliver and absorb messages.

Tom Wanek will be presenting a workshop at the Wizard Academy in the coming months. Enter your email below, and I'll remind you with a post when the date has been finalized.

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The Importance of Story Telling

Just a program note that Austin Business District Magazine's BD Tech Daily has picked up a post I did on the Bootstrap Network blog. In it I discuss how David Ansel, the Soup Peddler built an amazingly loyal customer base by telling (and living) stories.

This is a great lessons for marketers.

If You're Selling to Humans, You've Got to Tell Stories

How did David Ansel build a business peddling soup around Austin? He sold something more valuable than good soup. He sold a story.

 

 

Conversion Science, Friends and Customers

At the risk of sounding like I'm bashing SEO people, a friend of mine forwarded me this old blog post from Seth Godin's blog.  It's the last line that is intriguing to a Conversion Scientist like myself.

"You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers."

This a poetic way to describe what we're trying to do with conversion, and why I believe "conversion" will be the hot marketing term by the end of 2008.

Seth's Blog: The problem with search engine optimization

Business Owners: Here's the Truth About Building Your Web Site

It's Time for a Rant

Throughout my career, I've been involved in tens of Web projects -- many of which started before my involvement, but not all. The vast majority of them have fallen far short of their initial vision. Many were all-out train wrecks.

Business Owners, read this before you decide to create a Web presence, "update" your Web site or start taking orders online.

What I am writing here about the professionals you will work with isn't true. But, it is exactly what you will experience if you decide to manage the Web development process yourself.

The Low Barrier to Entry Trap

Software seems very malleable. It looks at first glance (and second and third) like something that’s cheap to produce and easy to change. That’s the trap.

If you buy into the thought that there is a low barrier to entry in software – and Web sites especially – you’ll also buy this little gem:

It’s more cost-effective to build an application and release it to the public than it is to research your audience to tell you what to build.

The people who write software have seen high-profile stories of this strategy at work. It general will NOT work for your business, and you shouldn’t have to depend on such a strategy, because, over time, it's very expensive.

This is the first major disconnect between Web developer and business owner.

The Disconnect Between Business Owner and Web Developer

The business owner sees a Web site as a brochure that takes orders. To them, a Web site is a convincing collection of words and pictures with the added bonus that people can actually buy stuff. Right there. In the brochure.

The Web developer sees it as a puzzle in which the pieces don’t have to fit perfectly. To them a Web site is an imperfect, growing and self-evolving organism. Developers are patient people. It’s just software.

Meanwhile the business owners fortunes are dependent on the site. As development stretches on and on, he sees his fortunes going down the toilet. The business owner really doesn’t understand why a brochure that sells stuff is so hard to get finished.

Working with Developers Sucks

You will never find a person less able to communicate, worse at time management, more limited in planning ability and more truly autistic in his professional relationships than you will in a Web developer.

If they're busy, you’re really hosed.

My mind boggles at how few exceptions I’ve seen in the innumerable Web development projects I’ve been involved in. And, as a developer, I was not an exception.

Web developers are sometimes brilliant, but they're rarely effective.

A talented project manager may know how to accommodate such an animal. A business owner, with other matters to consider is going to crash and burn.

And it doesn't stop with the Web developers.

Designers Design for Themselves

Great designers don’t compromise. Unfortunately, bush league designers don’t either.

Designers are doing art. No matter what they tell you, they can rarely prevent themselves from injecting some part of their soul into your logo design. Once that happens, asking them to change something is like asking them to remove one of the legs from their newborn baby. They will do it if you insist, but you know things will never be the same between you.

Three Comps and Your Out

Rather than doing the hard work of understanding your customer, they revert to the "three comps" method of design research. Once they've created a spectrum of creative design comps, guess who picks the winner. The business owner. The one person least qualified to make design decisions.

Inevitably, he or she will prefer one of the two “throw away” comps instead of the one that has the designer has embedded his soul into.

Needless to say the relationship starts off on a bad footing.

The poor business owner is in a quandary. He is completely unqualified to select a design, yet it is his duty to choose well. He must live with the decision for a long time.

If he’s lucky, he’ll be brow-beaten into agreeing with the designer. If not, nothing the designers do will be quite right. Designers inevitably will prove that you should have listened to them.

SEO? SEM? Google?

The Shaman comes in, dressed in animal furs, waving his chicken foot, chanting to the Search Spirits, asking that they may grant the business the blessings of high search rankings, more traffic and much bounty.

Search is a very cost-effective way to advertise. There really are just a few things you need to do to effectively tell a search engine what you’re Web site is about.

The search engines want to know what you’re about.

So, how does something as straight forward as telling a search engine who you are produce such a mind-numbing assortment of schemes and tactics? How is it that there are 1000 small SEO consulting shops none of which use the same strategy? It’s because everyone is guessing.

SEO experts know for certain that their belly button moves up and down when they breathe. They just don’t know why. However, it's obvious they need to breathe in more and avoid breathing out if they want higher a belly button position.

SEO is important, and the business owner doesn’t have any frame of reference for where to put his money. He’s guessing too.

What if the Shaman brings his medicine, but the patient still dies? Well, the SEO expert can’t be responsible for a Web site that doesn’t convert. That’s a marketing or creative issue.

Copywriters and PTSD

Like designers, copywriters believe what they do is art. They are really writers who have added "copy" to their title because it pays better.

However, designers use complex tools with names like "Photoshop" to maintain gatekeeper status over their work.

Copywriters have no such protection.

The Blood of Their Children

The red ink that a business owner pours over their work looks to them like blood. There's little they can do, and then PTSD sets in -- Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most are beaten into submission, delivering mind-numbing copy with the flavor of Styrofoam.

You see it every day. Incoherent chains of adverbs and multi-syllabic words designed only to make the business look smarter or bigger than it really is.

Good copywriters are story tellers. Business owners want manifestos to what they've built.

Unfortunately, business owners don't often meet their copywriters. The design firm often hides these poor vulnerable creatures away to minimize their pain.

Business Owners On Their Own

The business owner has his years of experience working with his customers. He has this vision for his business that he can’t get out of his head. He has a product that he’s thought about non-stop for years. The developers and designers and consultants and writers all tell him that it’s important to understand his market.

Then they make the mistake of asking him “so who are you selling to.”

Inevitably, the business owner will tell them about everyone he’s ever sold to all mashed into one über-human.

The über-human is an entity that doesn’t exist in the real world.

Marketers may even try to demographically segment the über-human into über-children, none of whom exist in the real world, either.

Then, they all go off and develop for, design for, optimize for and write for their own individual image of the client’s customer.

It's a mess.

My Advice for the Business Owner

Pay for the Process

My advice to the business owner is to hire professionals that have a discovery process, a process that intimately involves you. Processes feel expensive because you buy a great deal of a professional's time before anything actually appears on the Web.

You'll get every penny of it back and more.

Pick a Good Process

If you don't say "Ah HA" many times during this discovery process, you have bought into a poor process. If you are not learning new things about your business through the eyes of these other professionals, then they are not learning much either.

Have Someone in Your Camp

Make sure you have a project manager or marketer that works for you to manage the project. They must understand your business and advocate for you.

When what is being produced by these vendors no longer reflects your business's interests, all will be lost.

Watch the Results

Make sure that everything results in a measurable payoff that can be examined at least once a month -- sales, leads or traffic. When these measures aren't growing, stop whatever it is your consultants are doing and start asking questions.

Trust the Process

Once you feel that your Web development team has been informed by a strong discovery process, and they know that you'll know if things go awry, you can let these broken but talented professionals spread their wings.

Let the designers be artful.

Let the writers tell their stories.

Let the developers go off to their caves until the next deadline.

You don't have to know what they do as long as they really know what you do.

Brian Massey has at some point in his career been a Web developer, designer, writer and SEO consultant.

Photo courtesy mikekorn.

#10 Are You Brave Enough to Give Web Visitors What They Want?

Am I a Marketing Sheep? 261 Questions.

"You're nuts."

That's what Justin Singer of SMBology reports hearing from roughly half of the people he's heard from about the Competitors page on his Web site.

Yes, he lists all of his competitors on his Web site. Furthermore, it's a main navigation link.

No, it's not smart to connect potential customers to your competitors, unless that is what they want.

So, who wants to know who your competitors are? According to Justin, its the other half of the people he talks to. In a competitive market (there are 28 competitors listed on his site), Justin wants to differentiate his business on trust. With one word on his home page, he communicates the following:

If we were trying to pull a fast one on you; if we weren't willing to stand behind our service; if we didn't believe we were the best solution for you, would we put a list of competitors on our Web site?

There is no doubt that Justin is losing potential business because some of his visitors will check out his competitors. But, he believes he's gaining the right customers by demonstrating that SMBology is trustworthy supplier who's not afraid to stand side by side with others in the market.

Justin wants to do business with those customers who say "that's gutsy. That's who I want handling my IT services."

In every marketing campaign there are those things that we as marketers know will land with our target audience. When good marketing messages conflict with knee-jerk fears about "looking corporate;" when effective copy is dumbed down so that no one gets left out, are you prepared to defend your best prospects' needs and desires?

"Always Be Opening" and Other Unexpected Advice

I'm a bit skeptical of Webinars, white papers, and free eBooks. That's ironic as I'm a big fan of informational offers to generate online leads. Too often, these little morsels are self-serving, are not actionable, will talk down to me or are just plain boring.

So, I'm bringing a free ebook entitled Give Marketing a Sales Quota from Hugh Macfarlane to your attention that delivers the goods. Eloqua got my contact information, and I feel that I got good value in exchange. Unfortunately, there's no landing page that I can refer you to. So I'm linking directly to the ebook.

I wanted to add a little commentary to some points made in the book.

Always Be Opening

Make sure that sales is paying attention to the leads you're generating for them. Don't just incentivize Sales to close. It makes them spend their time with prospects that are already being worked. Incentivize them to open the next fresh lead before it goes cold.

Marketing is Only Valuable When it Delivers Revenue

I love this simple concept because, if you can get your organization to believe this, it addresses two of my pet peeves:

1. You have a good argument for killing the image-building brand-awareness crap that doesn't deliver the goods.

2. Marketing execs, long considered the head of the "creative department" can finally get a seat at the strategy planning table with the CFO and COO.

"Fragmented and incremental activities"

Your typical corporate marketing strategy can usually be described as a series of "fragmented and incremental activities." I'll hum a few bars, but you know the words:

What 10 things can we get done this quarter? OK, let's see which of those the CEO will let us do. When we're done, we'll have some cool creative to put on the slides that we present to the executives.

We don't know what problems our buyers face

We're so busy constructing positive messages about our company and our products, we don't acknowledge the pain and trade-offs that our prospects face when deciding if they will buy.

This is why I have dedicated myself to brining personas to the marketing world. At the heart of the persona is the reason a person comes to your Web site. The power of the conversion profile is that it lets everyone -- Sales and Marketing -- slip into the prospect's shoes.

Recycle the Leakage

Conversion is not the rate at which your Web site converts. That's your conversion rate. Conversion starts Conversations. Marketing has to be ready to carry on these conversations for the entire 3-9 month sales cycle faced by many B2B companies.

Read the eBook

This is good marketing. My apologies to Eloqua for linking directly to the book, but they didn't include a "share with a friend" link. That's a problem.

Photo courtesy juliaf

Putting Wind at Your Back: 14+1 Trends

How about a little time-shifted live blogging?

I just discovered Seth Godin's Keynote speech from SES Chicago on Webmaster Radio. I don't even know when the event actually took place. I wanted to capture what I heard, so I started typing. Why not make it a blog post?

This stuff is in Seth's book Meatball Sundae.

Seth prefaced this list as "14 things that I see going on." Each of these trends can be wind at your back.

1. Direct communication between consumers and producers. Example: Sonos

2. Consumers are louder than ever before - Amplified word of mouth

3. Authentic Stories - People don't have time for fineprint, watch infomercial. They grab stories. At best they'll get a charicature of your brand. Tell your story and live it.

4. Speed. Are you organized around a factory or delivery?

5. The Long Tail - Example: Amazon gets half their sales from books that B&N doesn't even carry.

6. Outsourcing - If you're job can be reduced to manual, sooner or later your company will find someone else to do it for cheaper.

7. Google - Things are being unbundled, divided into molecules

8. Infinite channels of communication. TV, Radio, YouTube, Internet

9. Consumer to consumer relationships - eBay, Kiva (fastest growing charity by far), Paypal

10. Flip in the difference between scarcity and abundance.

11. Triumph of Big Ideas. Stories spread very quickly.

12. Debate about who vs. how many. Were you in the business of harvesting attention when attention was cheap? How many isn't as important today as who and why. Get exactly the right "who."

13. The rich are different from the who the rich used to be. Now we find rich people everywhere we look -- some with extremely bad taste.

14. New gatekeepers and No gatekeepers. You don't control your message. But you can deliver your message without being limited by others.  

15. Bonus: Upside-down bell curve. The difference between scarcity and ubiquity and the dangerous middle. People know the information is free, but the event or souvenir isn't.

Good Point: People are looking for a moderator -- not someone to exploit them. If you become that moderator, you have longevity.

The opportunity for the people in this room is NOT to change what goes on at the top of the business pyramid, where sales and marketing happen. The opporunity is NOT to change the busy stuff at the top, but to change the bottom of the pyramid, where products are created and services delivered.

From a conversion standpoint it's this: Make promises to those who come to your site. Promise that you know their problem and will help them solve it. But NEVER NEVER make promises you can't keep.

With Corporate America changing its marketing and product development, Seth Godin in his 2007 SES Chicago Keyonote tells us why we should take part

Question #9: Do You Show the Product?

Am I a Marketing Sheep? 261 Questions

Advertising Strategy #1: Show the product.

Advertising Strategy #2: Talk about a benefit.

Advertising Strategy #3: Show the product again.

A Coremetrics study reveals that video product tours increase sales conversions. I could go on about how engaging or immersive product video tours are, but I think that's missing the point.

I truth, I think we just do a crappy job of showing the product on the Web. Product tours work because they are the opposite of crappy.

But, don't get hung up on the effort required to generate video or flash product tours. You can increase conversions by simply having lots of high resolution pictures of your products from as many angles as you can think of.

Services Businesses Aren't Off the Hook

If you can't think of a way to "show the product" just because you're a services business, then you're not thinking creatively enough.

How about those pictures of pleasant-looking ladies smiling with their headsets on? That's a pretty good way to "show" customer service.

Spokespeople are a great way to "show" a service. How is the Go Daddy Girl showing a domain registration and hosting service? Well, she just is.

Your whitepapers should have pictures of the report as if it were printed. Let the user click on the image to get a large (e.g. readable) image of the cover.

Your testimonials and case studies should have pictures of the smiling customers with them. They are the product.

When you can't show the product as a services business, your only alternative is to blather on about your service. And that's what we sheep do.

Video Product Tours Yield 35% Increase in Online Sales Conversion - MarketingVOX

Photo Credits: Capqros, panda68

More Social Networks? Yes, Please.

Brochure Web sites are so over.

Anyone who is exasperated over the proliferation of social networks should ask themselves: do you want more brochure Web sites or other one-way push information Web sites?

Any business that is considering putting up an old style brochure site is nuts.

It doesn't take a million people to make a successful network. If there are 1,000 people passionate about your enterprise email software solution that dots all 'i's with smiley faces, then give them a way to share with each other.

Blog with them.

Let them build a profile if there is a social component to the product.

Let them invite others to see their smiley 'i' documents. It's WOM marketing.

Let them write reviews of the before and after. It's great for SEO.

Let them post about how smiley 'i's increase readability and make people feel good. It turns your customers into sales people.

Create implementation groups so that your customers can help new users get the most out of their smiley 'i' module. Let them help prospects sell this to the CEO.

It's now easy to put these kind of sites in place. So, why put up a site that blathers on about your "morale improving font modification module for email servers" when your customers will do the talking and sharing for you?

More Social Networks? - AdGabber

Photo courtesy of dhester on stock.xchng.

Why You Have Time to Use Personas

Jason at 37signals made a great point about personas.

You are already using them.

However, the ones you're using are probably versions of you. If not, the personas you are using is an amalgam of the last customers you talked to.

And furthermore, the person writing your copy is using a persona: himself. The person doing your design is designing for a persona: their last customer.

And the beat goes on.

Then you review the work and ask them to nudge it to be a little bit more like you, or maybe just your last customer. No wonder your site continues to be a mix of headings, copy, images and navigation all working against each other.

Pick personas that will work for you. Do an intimate profile so that everyone can understand who they're working for.

It's powerful stuff. And you won't have to redesign the site over again when the one you have fails to deliver.

Ask 37signals: Personas? - (37signals)

Thanks to Brian Eisenberg for the pointer.

Photo courtesy gun.

Using Continuity and Congruence in Conversion

The folks at Marketing Experiments did a couple of landing page case studies that used Continuity and Congruence to improve conversion results significantly.

The Eisenberg brothers have one word for it: scent.

Continuity means, in this case, making the headline and copy of the landing page match the ad that drove the traffic to it. They also call this ad-to-page relevance. I love big words.

To increase continuity, they recommend "determining why people are using a key phrase" and "Writing ad copy that goes beyond key words to the intention of the searcher."

So, how did they know the why and the intention? How would you know?

Congruence means "ensuring that every element of your page either states or supports the Value Proposition."

They increased congruence by making all elements address an "intense, emotional tone" and "emphasizing what the charity is doing with the donation."

So, how did they know to make the changes they made?! How would you know?

Here is the value of the Persona and the Conversion Profile.

Megan's Law Persona

Judging from the first case landing page they created, they had in mind someone concerned about their children. They are a parent of children under 15, probably female. They aren't on the site to read about Megan's Law. They want to know if a sex offender lives in their neighborhood.

The headline talks about Megan's Law telling them their in the right place. The copy is brief and uses scannable bullet points. The signup form is brief and right at the top of the page. This is someone who is behaving with a Spontaneous personality on this page.

The Alzheimer's Donor Persona

Relaters or Humanistic personalities want to do good by others, often putting themselves second to others. The page created for the second case study starts with a picture of an Alzheimer's patient and their grand child. "Meet Jenny and Her Grandma."

Elements on the page are designed to build trust, since their greatest fear is being taken advantage of. The page tells them that the cure is near if only they could do their part.

Your Personas

You can make good decisions on your Web site and reap the rewards by creating profiles of your best customers. Why are they searching? What are their payoffs for buying what you sell? What is happening in their lives that have brought them to you?

Profiles help you organize what you already know about your customers. They are communication tools that make sure everyone is on the same page: the copywriters, designers, and ad people.

Drop me an email and I'll share with you a sample profile format that you can use in your business.

Landing Page Optimization

Photos courtesy of brendan76 and chadguy.

Personas Do More Than Increase Conversion Rates

There was a long pause. "Wow, that could be our tag line."

I was on the phone with three executives of a $150 million telecommunications services company. We were in the middle of a Conversion Analysis Interview in which I was taking them through the process of organizing what they already knew about their customers.

The process includes discovering the core benefits of each of the "features" of what they offer. In this case, we uncovered new ways to look at and talk about the business.

The interview is part of a process designed to create Personas, or "named profiles that represent members of each key customer group, and describe their characters, personalities, tastes, and quirks." Once we're done with the process, then entire team -- copywriters, designers, marketers -- talk in a different way about their visitors.

"Tom Techie isn't going to relate to this copy."

"Mary Meticulous needs a more detailed spec sheet on the site."

"We'll put a big read button in the header for Peter Paniced."

Tom, Mary and Peter are Personas, virtual stand-ins for larger segments of my clients' visitors. The names draw to mind intimate details about each persona and give the entire team a uniform focus.

People can relate to people easier than they can relate to analytics reports.

Unexpected Benefits

In almost every one of the conversion interviews I've done over the past year, we've accomplished more than we expected to.

• We've simplified messages by boiled long lists of feature statements into a few core benefits
  
• We've reduced the workload of marketing teams by making it intuitive to prioritize content development
  
• We've redefined the company tag line or value statement
  
• We've gotten previously unheard salespeople into the marketing process
  
• We've helped executives understand "what the hell was the marketing team thinking" when proposing experimental projects.

We've also increased conversion rates and revenues.

If I haven't personally introduced you to Conversion Analysis using Personas, then read this InternetRetailer.com article for a great summary of what they are and why they work. Thanks to GrokDotCom.com for the reference.

InternetRetailer.com - Persona-lizing a site

GrokDotCom.com

Photo Courtesy bigevil600

So Is This Just a Link Bait Article?

For those of us with short attention spans, lists with more than 5 things on them often get passed over. Stoney deGeyter fails to expound upon his great little list of ways to keep our visitors sailing on toward conversion, which makes it perfect for us Spontaneous types.

But is this just a link-bait article that Stoney tossed together to generate links back to his site and raise his page rank?

There are some things in here that designers will rebel against, such as "Navigation must maintain simplicity of use." This means that three-tiered auto-rollout javascript menus are a BAD IDEA.

Has your designer ever wanted to do something cool, like put navigation in bubbles around some central image? Stoney's got it stone cold. "Location of main navigation should be near the top and/or left side of the page."

Some of these things don't necessarily make design sense, but are now Web conventions. An example of this is the requirement that the company logo ("Site Indicator") link to the home page, rather than the contact us page or the CEO's blog.

Link Bait?

Stoney has a good SEO back-link to his company's site in his sidebar bio "search engine marketing company." However, the destination of that link is hopelessly broken.

The URL tells us that this page wants to contain quotes, perhaps a testimonial page. If Stoney's building the page rank of this page, he's wasting energy.

Stoney's written a number of articles for ISEdb and there is value there, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Yes, this article is link bait, and it's done in the right way: by providing good content.

20 Ways to NAVIGATE to Higher Conversions by Stoney deGeyter

Brian Massey

Gooruze? What do you think?

I've recently come across Gooruze.com, which Mashable.com billed as the Digg for Marketers. You can see my fledgling profile at bmassey.gooruze.com.

Social marketers, take note

I'm writing this blog because of some viral genius by the folks at Gooruze.

Their offer is this: "If you already have a blog, don't retype the content here. We'll mirror your blog posts." OK. Nothing new there. But after supplying my RSS feed, they ask me to verify that it's my blog by including "bmassey.gooruze.com somewhere in the first few lines of a blog post."

Yes, this is an effective way to verify a post.

But think of what it does for their exposure on the Marketing aisle of the blogosphere. Think about what it does for their search engine ranking.

This is great social engineering and I predict excellent growth for Gooruze. Let's hope the community is as interesting... and that this isn't just a ruze (I couldn't resist).

8. Do you know what your visitors are looking for?

Are you a marketing sheep? 261 Questions.